Thank you very much. Thank you for those good words.
On the threats, I would like to name them maybe more as challenges, not threats. We don't say that we have today direct military threats. I just spoke about increasing militarization in an environment that has been changing during the last years. But the main security challenges for Lithuania today are energy and security.
Today, when I am here, my Parliament voted in the first reading for very important laws on energy security issues, on an LNG terminal, and the special law on a nuclear plant we would like to build together with the Japanese company, Hitachi, and General Electric. We still have the former Soviet Union infrastructure on energy and on railways also. We need to do a lot to change this, and this is the main challenge for my government. We are finalizing now what we already were doing for the last three years, and this is challenge number one, because the Russian Federation thinks that it has the right to use energy resources as a tool to influence neighbouring countries, and this is what we feel every day.
The second one is the information environment. I have a lot of examples of how Russia is trying to influence Baltic states via media, via TV, and they are even spending special funding, special money. We know that they are spending $8 billion a year especially for spreading information around. So it's something. We call it propaganda, but it's our reality, and still we have to fight this to convince people. You ask the question, what do people think about that? There is still some kind of battle every day in every country.
The last example is the Latvian referendum on language. It was a real battle, and it was funded from outside, not only from inside the country but from outside the country. If we are able to fight these challenges, to overcome these challenges, especially on energy security, we will be much safer in the future, and these threats or militarization that is going around will not be so dangerous for us if we are more secure inside the country, not having any tool and instrument to intervene in our region, as there is up to now.
I am very much optimistic on that, because of what I mentioned already: Baltic cooperation, Baltic-Nordic cooperation, our membership in EU. We are solving these problems together with the EU. We're not left alone. What we are doing today on energy security is very common for the rest of Europe and in NATO also.
So I don't know if I answered your question, but NATO also helps a lot. I already mentioned common planning, planning on possible contingencies in our region. It's very important, this breakthrough during our membership, and what we are doing now together with NATO. I mentioned military exercises. I mentioned missile defence, which is very important for Europe and us, too, because we are like a sandwich. The Russian Federation is doing their installations, so that's why for us it's so important that the European part of NATO could cover it by missile defence installations.